Does China’s energy appetite make it a great power?

The Paris-based International Energy Administration, the energy equivalent of the G-20, made a notable announcement on Monday: Last year, China became the biggest energy consumer on the planet. (BP came close to saying so a month ago as well.) You can see China’s inexorable energy consumption advance over the last two decades, as compared with the United States, here:

In The Prize, energy guru Daniel Yergin correlates energy consumption with a nation’s greatness. So in theory, by the Yergin Rule, the referee would blow the whistle and end the game now: China has crossed the bar, and is all but certain to become the greatest geopolitical power on the planet. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, IEA chief economist Fateh Birol declared “a new age in the history of energy.”

Really? To be sure, many signs point to a Chinese century — but the IEA report isn’t one of them.  

By absolute numbers, China uses more energy than any other country (unless you ask the Chinese themselves, who disputed the IEA report). But each individual Chinese used only 12 barrels of oil equivalent last year, versus 52 barrels by each American. When you’re applying the Yergin Rule, this is the metric that matters.

And crucially, China reaches this milestone because of its use of a pre-industrial age fuel: coal. Two-thirds, or 1.5 billion tons, of the 2.25 billion tons of oil equivalent that China consumed last year was coal. In the United States, coal comprised just 22 percent of the 2.1 billion tons of oil equivalent energy consumed, as the Journal‘s Liam Denning reports in Heard on the Street. As for oil, the fuel that created the modern economy, China consumed just 9 million barrels a day last year. The United States consumed 19 million barrels a day.

The distinction is important. Coal’s btu value is vastly inferior to oil — a ton of oil has more than twice the heat content as coal (44.5 million btu per ton versus 18.1 million btu per ton, respectively). If China used a lot more horses than the United States to plow its fields, would that be a measure of its greatness? Of course not.